Soon after Zhou Yi's HIV positive status was known by his colleagues, he found them sterilizing their office telephone with alcohol, and refusing to use the office microwave oven.

Then he quit. "I quit my job (two years ago) not because my boss made me, but because I couldn't stand the discrimination any more," said Zhou, from Shanghai, at a Workshop for Discrimination in the Workplace hosted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Beijing Friday.

Zhou, still unemployed, is just one of many people living with HIV who lost or changed their jobs due to workplace discrimination.

A survey conducted by UNAIDS and China, found 23.3 percent of 2,096 HIV-positive workers claimed they had been denied employment, and many did not expose their positive status for fear of discrimination.

There are currently an estimated 700,000 people living with HIV in China, including about 75,000 AIDS patients.

In 2009, China reported that AIDS had become the country's leading cause of death among infectious diseases for the first time.

The Friday's workshop set agenda on the new international labour standard on HIV and AIDS passed by ILO in June, which has been ratified by China.

The standard sets principles and provides recommendations on protecting workers' rights to employment and medical treatment.

Dr. Richard Howard, senior specialist for the ILOAIDS program in the Asia Pacific said, "China has an advanced policy framework to protect the rights of people with HIV."

Li Chuangchun, an official with All China Federation of Trade Unions, said China actually took action to protect HIV positive workers' rights well ahead of the introduction of the international standard.

China began implementing a regulation on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in 2006. The Law on the Promotion of Employment, which took effect in 2008, stipulates that employers cannot deny jobs to carriers of infectious diseases.

However, workplace discrimination is still fierce as the report of UNAIDS suggests.

Xue Cheng, an officer with UNAIDS, said the problem facing China was not so much lack of policies or laws, but a shortage of detailed regulations and a lack of supervision of law enforcement.

Liu Yutong, an official with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said one measure in action was labor arbitration facilities across China.

He said each province in China already had such facilities to which people with HIV could resort if they suffered workplace discrimination.

The ministry is also training labor inspectors to oversee the protection of rights of employees.

However, Michael Shiu, Vice President of Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the priority should be increasing public awareness.

He said that in a program his organization carried out, employers said even though they would hire HIV positive staff, they couldn't do so because other employees might be terrified, which would jeopardize harmony in work place.

Shiu said that not only the government, trade union and employers needed to make efforts, but the whole of society to eliminate discrimination and safeguard the right to work of people with HIV.

(Xinhua News Agency June 28, 2010)